cause to carry it so far would be to carry it beyond the legitimate bounds of analogy; and because analogy pursued but a single step beyond the limits of its proper province, is sure always to land the pursuer in error. Analogy is not identity. It is safe when it deals with generals; very unsafe when it grapples with particulars.

Analogy, I repeat, is not identity. Let me attempt illustrating the fact in its bearing on this question. We find reason to conclude, as Isaac Taylor well expresses it, that "the planetary stuff is all one and the same." And we know to a certainty, that human nature, wherever it exists in the present state of things, "is all one and the same" also. But when reasoning analogically regarding either, we can but calculate on generals, not particulars. Man being all over the world a constructive, house-making animal, and, withal, fond of ornament, one would be quite safe in arguing analogically, from an acquaintance with Europe alone, that wherever there is a civilized nation, architecture must exist as an art. But analogy is not identity; and he would be egregiously in error who should conclude that nations, civilized or semi-civilized, such as the Chinese, Hindoos, or ancient Mexicans, possess not only an ornate architecture, but an architecture divided into two great schools; and that the one school has its Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, and the other school its Saxon, Norman, and Florid styles. In like manner, man's nature being everywhere the same, it may be safely inferred that man will everywhere be an admirer of female beauty. But analogy is not identity; and it would be a sad mistake to argue, just as one chanced to be resident in Africa or England, that man everywhere admired black skins and flat noses, or a fair complexion and features approximating to the Grecian type. And instances of a resembling character may be multiplied without end. Analogy, so sagacious a guide in its own legitimate field, is utterly blind and senseless in the precincts that lie beyond it: it is nicely correct in its generals—

perversely erroneous in its particulars; and no sooner does it quit its proper province, the general, for the particular, than there start up around it a multitude of solid objections, sternly to challenge it as a trespasser on grounds not its own. How infer, we may well ask the infidel-admitting, for the argument's sake, that all the planets come under the law of geologic revolution -how infer that they have all, or any of them save our own earth, arrived at the stage of stability and ripeness essential to a fully developed creation, with a reasoning creature as its master-existence? Look at the immense mass of Jupiter, and at that mysterious mantle of cloud, barred and streaked in the direction of his trade winds, that for ever conceals his face. May not that dense robe of cloud be the ever-ascending steam of a globe that, in consequence of its vast bulk, has not sufficiently cooled down to be a scene of life at all? Even the analogue of our Silurian creation may not yet have begun in Jupiter. Look, again, at Mercury, where it bathes in a flood of light-enveloped within the sun's halo, like some forlorn smelter sweltering beside his furnace-mouth. A similar state of things may obtain on the surface of that planet, from a different though not less adequate cause. But it is unnecessary to deal further with an analogy so palpably overstrained, and whose aggressive place and position in a province not its own so many unanswerable objections start up to elucidate and fix.

The subject, however, is one which it would be difficult to exhaust. The Christian has nothing to fear, the infidel nothing to hope, from the great truths of Geology. It is assuredly not through any enlargement of man's little apprehension of the Infinite and the Eternal that man's faith in the scheme of salvation by a Redeemer need be shaken. We are incalculably more in danger from one unsubdued passion of our lower nature, even the weakest and the least, than from all that the astronomer has yet discovered in the depths of heaven or the geologist in the bowels of the earth. If one's heart be right, it is surely

a good, not an evil, that one's view should be expanded; and Geology is simply an expansion of view in the direction of the eternity that hath gone by.

It is not less, but more sublime, to take one's stand on the summit of a lofty mountain, and thence survey the great ocean over many broad regions-over plains, and forests, and undulating tracts of hills, and blue promontories, and far-seen islandsthan to look forth on the same vast expanse from the level champaign, a single field's-breadth from the shore. It can indeed be in part conceived from either point how truly sublime an object that ocean is-how the voyager may sail over it day after day, and yet see no land rise on the dim horizon-how its numberless waves roll, and its great currents ceaselessly flow, and its restless tides ever rise and fall—how the lights of heaven are mirrored on its solitary surface, solitary though the navies of a world be there and how, where plummet-line never sounded, and where life and light alike cease, it reposes with marble-like density, and more than Egyptian blackness, on the regions of a night on which there dawns no morning. But the larger view inspires the profounder feeling. The emotion is less overpowering, the conception less vivid, when from the humble flat we see but a band of water rising, to where the sky rests, over a narrow selvedge of land, than when, far beyond an ample breadth of foreground, and along an extended line of coast, and streaked with promontories and mottled with islands, and then spreading on and away in an ample plain of diluted blue, to the far horizon, we see the great ocean in its true character, wide and vast as human ken can descry. And such is the sublime prospect presented to the geologist as he turns him towards the shoreless ocean of the upper eternity. The mere theologian views that boundless expanse from a flat, and there lies in front of him but the narrow strip of the existing creation—a green selvedge of a field's-breadth, fretted thick by the tombs of dead men; while to the eye purged and strengthened by the euphrasy

of science, the many vast regions of other creations-promontory beyond promontory-island beyond island-stretch out in sublime succession into that boundless ocean of eternity, whose sumless, irreduceable area their vast extent fails to lessen by a single handbreadth-that awful, inconceivable eternity-God's past lifetime in its relation to God's finite creatures—with relation to the Infinite I AM Himself, the indivisible element of the eternal now. And there are thoughts which arise in connexion with the ampler prospect, and analogies, its legitimate produce, that have assuredly no tendency to confine man's aspirations, or cramp his cogitative energies, within the narrow precincts of mediocre unbelief. What mean the peculiar place and standing of our species in the great geologic week? There are tombs everywhere; each succeeding region, as the eye glances upwards towards the infinite abyss, is roughened with graves; the pages on which the history of the past is written are all tombstones; the inscriptions epitaphs: we read the characters of the departed inhabitants in their sepulchral remains. And all these unreasoning creatures of the bygone periods-these humbler pieces of workmanship produced early in the week—died, as became their natures, without intelligence or hope. They perished ignorant of the past, and unanticipative of the future --knowing not of the days that had gone before, nor recking of the days that were to come after. But not such the character of the last born of God's creatures-the babe that came into being late on the Saturday evening, and that now whines and murmurs away its time of extreme infancy during the sober hours of preparation for the morrow. Already have the quick eyes of the child looked abroad upon all the past, and already has it noted why the passing time should be a time of sedulous diligence and expectancy. The work-day week draws fast to its close, and to-morrow is the Sabbath!

CHAPTER XVIII.

The Penny-a-mile Train and its Passengers-Aunt Jonathan-London by night-St. Paul's; the City as seen from the Dome-The Lord Mayor's coach-Westminster Abbey-The Gothic architecture a less exquisite production of the human mind than the Grecian-Poets' Corner-The Mission of the Poets-The tombs of the kings-The monument of James Watt-A humble coffee-house and its frequenters-The woes of genius in London-Old 110 Thames Street-The Tower-The Thames Tunnel-Longings of the true Londoner for rural life and the country; their influence on literature -The British Museum; its splendid collection of fossil remains-Human skeleton of Guadaloupe-The Egyptian Room-Domesticities of the ancient Egyptians-Cycle of reproduction-The Mummies.

I MUST again take the liberty, as on a former occasion, of antedating a portion of my tour: I did not proceed direct to London from Olney; but as I have nothing interesting to record of my journeyings in the interval, I shall pursue the thread of my narrative as if I had.

For the sake of variety, I had taken the penny-a-mile train; and derived some amusement from the droll humours of my travelling companions-a humbler, coarser, freer, and withal merrier section of the people, than the second-class travellers, whose acquaintance, in at least my railway peregrinations, I had chiefly cultivated hitherto. We had not the happiness of producing any very good jokes among us; but there were many laudable attempts; and though the wit was only tolerable, the laughter was hearty. There was an old American lady of the company, fresh from Yankee-land, who was grievously teased for the general benefit; but Aunt Jonathan, though only indifferently furnished with teeth, had an effective tongue; and Mister Bull, in most of the bouts, came off but second best. The American, too, though the play proved now and then some